Business rates update – Scottish Government implementation plans

CBI Scotland update on the Scottish Government's latest plans for taking forward the recommendations of the Barclay Review of business rates.

Members will be aware of CBI Scotland’s continued work feeding into the Barclay Review of Business Rates, which reported on 22nd August 2017. Overall the report and its recommendations were welcome and reflected a number of CBI Scotland’s recommendations in our submission.

Finance Secretary Derek Mackay announced in his budget statement to parliament that he would ‘go beyond’ what was recommended in the Barclay Review, referring to the Growth Accelerator that aims to incentivise investment through rates holiday on improved properties for the first year.

He also announced a switch from RPI to CPI, which was one of CBI Scotland’s key recommendations to the Barclay Review to rein in unsustainable rates increases. Disappointingly the Scottish Government gave no clear commitment to the recommendation to reduce the large business supplement and instead committed to consider it in future.

At the same time as the Draft budget in December 2017, the Scottish government published an implementation plan in response to the Barclay review where many of the recommendations were flagged to be informed by an advisory group convened by the government.

The first meeting of the Barclay Implementation Advisory group has now taken place and it will consider the practical implementation of the Barclay recommendations agreed by government. As a first step, officials will be producing a roadmap for the key recommendations taken forward and when stakeholders can feed in to legislation.

We encourage members with views on the appeals system and online rates billing to get in touch as their feedback and ideas are particularly sought by the implementation group.